...
I do believe your scenario could work globally, or between a coalition of powerful nations--supposing such a thing could ever be negotiated--but the real sticking point is once again economic growth. You appear to forget the profit motive, which drives all else before it. You can't have high-yield full employment and a stable population in a modern state that doesn't require external stimulus, let alone make a profit. Once again, insularity is required to make something approaching a perpetual-motion machine, and such a state could not be progressive but would have to be so efficient as to be effectively dormant, rather than a consumer-culture--such as Australia was before colonisation--which obviates the need for full employment.
What we need is a paradigm shift, but that's not going to happen while the profit-takers run the world.
We can make society more fair by sharing employment fully--and we should--but that would take the economic energy out of the system and seriously impair both the paradigm of conspicuous consumption and the economic dynamic--though I'm all for that!

Saltpetre,

You say these things are "surely a family and societal problem".

I don't think you can separate "schooling" from societal anything. It's a central plank in our societal arrangements. In any case, I'm merely critiquing the way it works. I don't for a minute suggest that you can do away with part of our system and leave the rest in place - it's all interconnected and mutually supportive.

I suppose I like to look at things from an anthropological point of view. We've only been doing it this way for what amounts to the blink of an eye in relation to all of human development.

Here's what Alvin Toffler had to say on the formulation of mass education in industrial society:

"Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialisation to produce the adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world.....the solution was an education system that in its very structure, simulated this new world...The whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education as it grew up followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organisation of knowledge into disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time. The inner life of school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to industrial society."

Hi Squeers,

The main reason for economic growth is to provide an increased number of jobs, so that population growth, doesn't lead to increased levels of unemployment.

The Opportunity Cost of spending capital on population growth infrastructure. means that a huge opportunity to spend that capital on productive investment in education, health and emerging technologies; is lost.

A vibrant, research and development orientated society is designed in by the mechanism, of diverting forgone growth infrastructure expenditure and taking this money for R & D.

New products, from this R & D investment and capitalism will drive change and vibrancy.

The ultimate restraint of the environment is also addressed by population stabilisation.

Cheers,

Ralph

Ralph Bennett:
<The main reason for economic growth is to provide an increased number of jobs, so that population growth, doesn't lead to increased levels of unemployment.>
I'm afraid this is naive. You think Economic growth is considerate and philanthropic?
Economic growth is driven by entrepreneurialism and concomitant material expansion/consumption, domestically and abroad. Population growth is pegged to ambition and enterprise and spiked with the advent of mechanisation and capitalism (reinvestment rather than husbanding of surplus): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg
We engineered and continue to drive a human plague.

<The Opportunity Cost of spending capital on population growth infrastructure. means that a huge opportunity to spend that capital on productive investment in education, health and emerging technologies; is lost.>
There would be no capital without population/material expansion somewhere? "Investment in education, health and emerging technologies" is prospective (as Poirot illustrates above) and entrepreneurial, not philanthropic.

<A vibrant, research and development orientated society is designed in by the mechanism, of diverting forgone growth infrastructure expenditure and taking this money for R & D.

New products, from this R & D investment and capitalism will drive change and vibrancy.

The ultimate restraint of the environment is also addressed by population stabilisation>

I've no wish to give offence but this is magic pudding talk.

Apologies for being a little off topic in my last. To tie it in; this is the reason no government would advocate job share, or seniors relinquishing their positions to the young. Our system requires gross disparities to drive envy, to fire ambition, to reward "success", and so to renew the dynamic. Young people are idealistic (they've been taught to be; lied to by their parents and their education. And btw Yabby, imo the vast majority of today's youth are as fine, in potentia, as they ever were; it's the system that ruins them) and get angry, but most of them give in and join the rat race. They are part of the cycle.
Egalitarianism is not possible at the high end--that is without perpetual economic growth/material expansion. Systemic egalitarianism is possible only in a state of mutual poverty. True prosperity is the reward for the careful husbandry of finite resources and self-management. And in such a dispensation modest and "directed" progressivism is still possible.
Youth has no hope of changing the world while money and power is held by cynical vested interests.

Squeers,

<Egalitarianism is not possible at the high end--that is without perpetual economic growth/material expansion.>

If you mean there will always be a ruling/elite class, you're right - but a better deal for the masses would be possible under Ralph's proposal for self-regulated population control (and reduction).

<Systemic egalitarianism is possible only in a state of mutual poverty.>

Ditto my above response.

<True prosperity is the reward for the careful husbandry of finite resources and self-management.>

Ralph also proposed this.

<And in such a dispensation modest and "directed" progressivism is still possible.>

You said it.

<Youth has no hope of changing the world while money and power is held by cynical vested interests.>

Maybe so, unless those vested interests change their vision for world progress (or are forced-to/deposed - Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, ..) in realisation of the futility and dysfunctionality of the current world system. A very big ask - for governments, for nations, for humanity - but it is ultimately these which must wrest control away from capital, and return power and dignity to humanity as a whole. A paradigm shift (as you previously mentioned). Possible? Let us hope so, for the sake of humanity.

The swords should be sheathed, hatreds and animosities forgotten, differences accepted and lauded - in a spirit of brotherhood, in quest of Eden. (But it ain't just around the corner - not yet, but hopefully before there is nothing left worth saving.)